All posts tagged: Hogre

2018 has been a good year for Street Art books, and your interest in the ones we have highlighted continues to assure us that “Print” is not dead. There is no better way to document a moment in this evolving scene for posterity than with the bound volume, and sometimes there is no better way to appreciate an artists work than to sit by a lamp or window with a book on your lap.

We know that you appreciate our daily analysis and efforts to elucidate and illustrate a fluid global Street Art/ graffiti / urban art scene here in digital, but we’re thrilled to give you solid options in book form as well. If you’re looking for a good quality art book to give this year, consider one of these hits from 2018. Enjoy!

“Inti, Color, Carnaval y Resistencia”, INTI.

From BSA:

“Certainties, simple explanations, last hopes, magic thoughts and fears. All of them confronted by what is evident.”

Thus describes the figure slung with bullets, holding a necklace with a cross and delicately balancing a small green apple on his index finger on a larger than life mural in Santiago, Chili. The visual language of this graffiti/Street Artist and muralist named Inti is his to wield, a cosmic folk expression that glows with celestial waves surrounding an other-worldly race of characters.

Bordalo II 2011 – 2017. Editor & Publisher Bordalo II. In conjunction with ATTERO and exhibition by Bordalo II held in Lisbon. November, 2017. Lisbon, Portugal. Click HERE for more about this book.

From BSA:

“The constant imposition of advertising in front of our eyes is an oppressive, dictatorial and violent act,” posits the artist, activist, and author Hogre in this new collection of works and words called Subvertising : The Piracy of Outdoor Advertising.

It sounds rather extreme when put this way, but perhaps that is the dulling power of advertising’s omnipresence in public space year after year. Each of us can certainly recall a time when there seemed like there was more open public space and fewer images and graphics and text telling us what to do, what to buy, who to hate, how to behave. Artists like Hogre are sounding the warning on our ability to recognize its power over our perceptions.

HOGRE. Subvertising: The Piracy Of Outdoor Advertising. Dog Section Press. London, 2017. Click HERE for more about this book.

“Add/Fuel -1- Monograph”, Diogo Machado AKA Add Fuel.

From BSA:

Via his own pop-culture interpretation of the interlocking curvilinear, geometric and graphic motifs, the Portuguese artist is firing new pieces daily in the kiln of his studio in Cascais. For a decade or so his interpretations of the tin-glazed ceramic tilework have been appearing on inordinate secondary city skins in the paths of pedestrians: visual illusions meant to appear as layers of urban bark peeling back from surfaces you take for granted to reveal heritage, history, artisanship.

While the interiors and exteriors of churches, palaces, schools and subway stations are covered with azulejos in Lisbon, thanks to Add Fuel (Diogo Machado) they have travelled to other cities and cultures as well. Each time he is attracted to the tile-making traditions locally, and he often incorporates his study of these new histories as well.

Add / Fuel – 1 – Monograph. Published by Diogo Machado. Portugal 2018. Click HERE for more about this book.

From BSA:

A serendipitous meeting somewhere in Berlin set this project in motion, and the results unveil an adrenaline fueled ride that always pushes, often exceeds the boundaries of physical safety and social acceptance while simultaneously thrilling graffiti fans and pissing off some public officials and property owners.

A new book captures the nature of the actions and adds to our conversations about art, vandalism, branding, public/personal space and its radical visual disruption. It’s a story made all the more remarkable during an increasing level of surveillance in a city that has basically embraced the bohemian and rebellious types who have transformed large parts of its cityscape, making Berlin a de facto capital of subculture, especially among the young.

Martha Cooper & Ninja K. One Week With 1UP. (photo courtesy of the team) Click HERE for more about this book.

From BSA:

A steel-wheeled graffiti train with Roger Gastman at the controls roars into LA’s Chinatown for a two-month stay at this station, a 40,000 square foot warehouse that houses “Beyond the Streets.” Originating at the streets and train yards of the 1960s and 70s, this express survey carries with it 100 or so artists and writers from across the last five decades as practitioners of graffiti, Street Art, and mural painting. Somehow, everyone gets represented.

“Canvas” Anders Gjennestad.

From BSA:

It sounds the same on the street as it does in the gallery space, and for Norwegian Street Artist Anders Gjennestad the two appear nearly identical, aside from context.

Whether he is discovering the neglected urban factory door long after the spirit of industry has roared its last turbine and reaching toward his backpack for a spray can, or he is hoisting a piece out from the pile of collected iron-bound wooded slabs in his Berlin studio, functionally each of these doors is a canvas.

Every urban explorer sees the potential of walls that are long abandoned and spoiled with rot and piss and pushed open by weeds, worn away by rain. The world is a temporary place anyway. I am only here temporarily.

Anders Gjennestad. “Canvas”. Published by Galerie Friedmann – Hahn. Berlin 2018. Click HERE for more about this book.

“FKDL” Frank Duval.

From BSA:

As you look through this new slim volume about the Street Artist/fine artist FKDL it may strike you how much autobiography is the determinant of an artist’s path as well. It’s the tale of a teenager finding himself, finding his vocation, and eventually finding his voice on the street. When you reach the end you see that it takes a number of years and a lot of experimentation, this journey.

FKDL. Galiote Prenant. Choisy-le-Roi, France. 2017. Click HERE for more about this book.

“Street To Studio”, Rafael Schacter.

“These are artists who are thus not slavishly reproducing their exterior practice within an interior realm but who are, rather, taking the essence of graffiti – its visual principles, its spatial structures, its technical methods, its entrenched ethics – and reinterpreting them with the studio domain,” says author Rafael Schacter in his introductory exposition for his book Street to Studio where he offers a unique assessment derived from his 10 years of researching the foundational, conceptual, methodological, and ethical considerations that impact the original graffiti/Street Art scene as well as where it is going.

“Feather and Faces”, Adele Renault.

From BSA:

Street Artist/fine artist Adele Renault understands our interdependence with the birds and with each other perhaps better than many, and “Feathers and Faces” carries the message powerfully by delivering these works she has done on city streets and galleries in New York, Berlin, Amsterdam, San Francisco, Singapore, Burkina Faso, Helsinki, Moscow…

We share this city with pigeons. We look to the same environment to supply us with what we need, including food, water, shelter – depending on physical factors like as soil, air, a temperate climate, other organisms. Adele studies our feathered friends and brings them full force to the streets, and we know that here only the scrappiest survive and get to display their colors.

Feathers And Faces by Adele Renault was published in 2018 and is distributed in the United States and Canada by SCB Distributors. Click HERE for more about this book.

“Ex Animo”, Faith XLVII.

From BSA:

Prayers of supplication and longing, racing teams of stallions and master felines of fury, the exhausted figure of a dream barely still illuminated, a wistful stage in the plundered urban landscape, or a plundered life.

This is what she does to you. As Faith IXVII leaves her stolen stanza, her massive mural in washed hues, her tributes to a moment lost in a city that would leave you to die if it had its way, she makes you make poetry.

Faith XLVII. “EX ANIMO’ THE WORK OF FAITH FORTY SEVEN/ 2010-2018. Drago Publishing. Rome, Italy, 2018. Click HERE for more about this book.

“Perception”, eL Seed.

And el Seed is the first to tell you that in this deeply personal account of his art project across fifty buildings in Mashiyat Naser, a neighborhood of Cairo over two years ago. Born of his personal need to challenge himself and to add more to his career as a respected muralist, his original concept of working in this neighborhood of 70,000 recyclers was informed by his own assumptions, perhaps of helping a community known in the city as Zabbaleen, or “garbage people”.

Over the course of the project he and his team describe through interviews and with his own diary style how their own eyes were opened. It is an incremental revelatory experience that paralleled the quote that he stylized throughout the pattern of his piece, “Anyone who wants to see the sunlight clearly needs to wipe his eyes first,” from the writings of Saint Athanasius of Alexandria, a fourth century Coptic Bishop.

El Seed PERCEPTION Published by Point à la Ligne. Milan, Italy. 2018. Click HERE for more about this book.

“Invasion: Los Angeles”, Invader.

From BSA:

One thing that some Street Artists do when their work enters the white cube is drop the “street” from their official moniker, instead preferring to be known simply as an “artist”. The decision is possibly to rid themselves of any subtle class distinctions or otherwise negative connotations that a potential collector or curator may have with the “street artist” label.

Other artists formerly known as “Street Artists” feel limited by the title because it doesn’t include all of their new interests and their complete practice – or because the term itself has evolved in their mind and the mind of the public to mean something unfavorable that they do not like to be associated with.

When it comes to the internationally renowned Street Artist Invader, its not a consideration – the street is in his DNA. His cryptic tile-made street practice is so proliferate across the world and so much a part of the metropolis like in his hometown of Paris that his art is literally and psychically fused with the city.

Invasion Los Angeles 2.1 / Updated Edition 1999 – 2018. A Book By Invader. Published by Control P. Editions. France 2018. Click HERE for more about this book.

“Russian Urban Art: History and Conflicts”, Igor Ponosov.

An academically sourced opinion-based essay in book form that looks to art, social, economic, and geopolitical movements during the start of the 20th century to better understand the evolution of Urban Art in post-Soviet Russia, Igor Ponosov delivers a welcome reconstruction of the timeline and movements that bring urban art to this day.

With the renewed interest in public art and muralism that has erupted over the last decade in many so-called Western cities it is good to learn how the public space in Russia has been catalyzed not-only by Hip Hop and new graffiti forms from Europe but also the history of Avant-garde art movements and Soviet Muralism in Russian Urban Art: History and Conflicts.

Igor Ponosov. Russian Urban Art: History And Conflicts. Moscow 2018. Published in collaboration with Street Art Museum, St Petersburg, Russia. Click HERE for more about this book.

“The constant imposition of advertising in front of our eyes is an oppressive, dictatorial and violent act,” posits the artist, activist, and author Hogre in this new collection of works and words called Subvertising : The Piracy of Outdoor Advertising.

It sounds rather extreme when put this way, but perhaps that is the dulling power of advertising’s omnipresence in public space year after year. Each of us can certainly recall a time when there seemed like there was more open public space and fewer images and graphics and text telling us what to do, what to buy, who to hate, how to behave. Artists like Hogre are sounding the warning on our ability to recognize its power over our perceptions.

Street Artists have been siting Guy Debord and the Situationists as the most influential originators of this practice of upending the commercial messages in public space, and many artists and collectives in recent years have begun in earnest campaigns of short-circuiting the machine.

Since the Situationist’s time in the 1950-60s, an ever-growing number of subvertising artists, thinkers and disaffected marketing majors have banded together to turn messages on their head – folks like The Billboard Liberation Front, Ron English, and Jenny Holzer come to mind. Now Hogre finds his practice with many peers, anonymous and known.

This collection of recent interventions of commercial billboards across London by Hogre and associates is documented in two page full color spreads accompanied by explanatory texts about the intention and inspiration. To the average citizen the messages range from blatant to quizzical to cryptic to so subtle that they may never be detected by the majority of passersby – but the thrill of the takeover never diminishes.

And the impact of the work should not be discounted – As creative and strategic as any advertising campaign or propaganda or disinformation, these acts of artful messaging can actively embarrass a public initiative, illuminate an environmental hazard, examine fundamental political structures, or question negative social attitudes toward sectors of society like immigrants or others in the margins.

The point made by Hogre and others is that as long as one recognizes that billboards and posters are a platform for delivering speech, that platform should be available to everyone regardless of their status, station, or bank balance. Styled as a system-fighting rebel, Hogre and his co-artivists are ultimately an optimistic voice in the public sphere – if for no other reason than to draw our attention to exactly how many commercial messages we are dining on daily.

Gwen Stacy Parts I and II

Disorderly, discordant, and richly chaotic, these two videos are centered around the Italian street art paintings and artists whom you will recognize from our earlier postings on community/gallery organized urban art programming – but within the context of historical art publicly displayed, peoples movements, patronage, fascism, the classics.

Discussions at panels cut into impassioned discussions by senior women in the courtyard or didactic examinations in the street – some for illustration, others for whimsy, none to be ignored. More of a fact finding mission than cogent analysis, you may find it difficult to follow the narrative and so it is better to let go and allow yourself be battered by the insights and observations delivered with the jumpy cuts and uncompleted thoughts and discussions, preferring instead to sink into the tribe of the humans, here selectively displayed for your pleasure and hopefully, edification.

Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.

Now screening :

1. ROME in the Street and the Gallery by Dioniso Punk
2. Hendrik Beikirch (ECB): East Harbor in the Netherlands
3. Michael Beerens – “Master”
4. “Art As A Weapon” Trailer

BSA Special Feature: ROME in the Street and the Gallery by Dioniso Punk

The punk rock connection to graffiti is as strong as any subculture’s – or of any people who feel marginalized in effect or practice by the dominant culture preventing their voice. The narrative that graffiti belongs exclusively to Hip Hop has been posited and disproved over time; as Jesus said, “Graffitti belongs to everyone.” *

In “Street & Gallery” we see that the need for expression, illegal and otherwise, is as urgent as ever in the Street Art scene in Rome today and for many it is a means to express opinions and philosophies that they hope will in turn push greater society forward in some way. For others it is simply to fight the stagnation.

Billed as an “unofficial video” by Dioniso Punk, the short documentary takes you into the kitchen and studio and gallery and street as a variety of artists, academics, vegetable vendors and philosophers narrate the pragmatic and the existential. Call it activism, call it a yearning for freedom, call it being generally pissed off at institutional inertia – the spirit of graffiti and it’s multiple urban art corollaries will not die. Either will arena rock and roll, despite early punk’s best wishes.

Interesting to note that the globalization of capital has not globalized all banks accounts and has thrust the xenophobia of the Italian middle class into a harsh light here, as it has elsewhere in so-called developed countries. Here we see a modern Italy struggling with ideological self-beliefs about justice and equality and wondering how they apply to a new immigrant class who has no interest in their cogitations. Moving from the educated class studio environment, the trained artist suddenly finds a social/political role, and for the first time perhaps contemplates it. Meanwhile, many in the street have never seen the inside of a studio and have a slightly different take on the state of things. Let the conversation continue.

Hendrik Beikirch: East Harbor in the Netherlands

Hendrik Beikirch traveled to Heerlen in the Netherlands to paint a new mural over three and a half days. Organized by Heerlen Murals, the wizened, troubled subject adds to the series of images ECB has been creating across many walls in the last handful of years.

Michael Beerens – “Master”

Last summer the Frenchman Beerens took a trip out into the mountains and created a piece on a a small abandoned building. Ah, summer, come thou near…

“Art As A Weapon” Trailer

From Breadtruck Films, the new documentary focuses on a school in Myanmar (Burma) that teaches street art as a form of non-violent struggle. Street Artists Shepard Fairey and JR figure into the story, as does the military, art as a weapon, and art as a tool for revolution.

Published last month this towering book with the page edges sprayed neon orange was released by Mehdi Ben Cheikh in French and English to commemorate the event, and seeing the installations this way is going to make you wish the place wasn’t destroyed. 500 new photos previously unpublished allows you to see the show as you travel from the cellar to the top floors.

You may wish you had more background on the artists and the context and clearly not all of the artistry is of similar quality but you will be satiated by the images and thankful that they were recorded during their brief duration. Published by Editions Albin Michel, in partnership with the Itinerrance Gallery, this show will continue to soar long after the dust has settled.

What did you do this summer? We’re starting off the week with a colorful and detailed travelog from Rosanna Bach, who really gives BSA readers a sense of the experience for Street Artists who go to distant places to create their art on walls for fun and festivals. Thanks to Rosanna as photographer and contributor, here you have an opportunity to spend some time in Italy traveling with Ever, Nanook, Sten & Lex as they go from Rome to Foligno, Italy. She documents their participation for the second edition of Attack Festival and captures the artists working under the scorching sun and in intimate, quiet settings. In this BSA exclusive Rosanna also put in words her summer experiences as she leaves Foligno for Paris where she documented EVER as he participated in Le Mur.

Roma to Foligno. We de-board the train and are about to exit the station when Ever waves me back. Sten is scuttling back and forth in the train like a trapped hamster. We thought he was stuck in there looking for an open door so we wave him over to the open door but he does not get out. He is struck with confusion as different orders fly from different directions. Meanwhile, the passengers are hanging over the windows to see what all the fuss is about.

Foligno, Italy. This was once called the “Centre of the World” because the Pope had supposedly kept his treasury here in the 15th century. It is certainly a beautiful place, although considerably more modest than its name implies. This is where we would spend the next five days and would be introduced to the “Hurdi Gurdi”. It is also a place where it seems that the solution to every problem was, “Lets go have a coffee”.

Sten & Lex, Nanook, and Ever had been painting together at the Open Walls Festival in Baltimore just a few months back. Three very different artists, from three corners of the world, were here meeting again in the “Centre of the World” for the second ever “Attack Festival”. Upon arrival we learn that we have arrived early. Two months early!

Sten & Lex. The two Italians have been working together for more then 10 years and are considered kind of the “Mama and Papa of stencil” in Italy where their current style consists of “stencil posters”; large scale wheat pasted portraits that they hand-cut intricate patterns onto. They usually use portraits of strangers, however this piece was of a friend’s brother who had taken his own life. They will return in September for round two.

Nanook. Fairly new to the street art scene (painting large scale for a year or so), he has left his studio that he used to share with “Gaia” back in Baltimore for new adventures in the old-world. He has been recording on paper his plan as he goes (from Berlin to Budapest and now Italy) “I feel so privileged to even be able to paint in this town, with all this history and the beautiful buildings”, he writes.

A calm and humble figure, he is constantly knocking out new sketches, whether using black ink or espresso in his black notebook, leaving no time for siestas. His hunger to learn is energizing; “I would just love to work and learn from an old master like they have here in Italy”.

As his style evolves playing by with realism, abstract lines and shapes, it will be very interesting to see how this young artist grows. In this piece he incorporated the shape of Umbria, the region in which Foligno lies. Now he is a one-way ticket to Buenos Aires. Lets see what happens…

Argentine artist Ever creates the most political work out of the three.

It must be a challenge to try and explain yourself in a foreign language that; you are not actually a devoted worshipper of Mao Tse Tung but that you are in fact talking about human contradiction, how in times of crisis people always seem to be convinced that the opposite is the solution. For example, as a result of the current decline of the capitalist system, many are swaying towards the left side of the political spectrum. “We are looking outward into one room. But why don’t we go to another room to find new solutions?” asks Ever.

As passers stopped to comment, Nanook looks frazzled and Ever lets them ramble on for minutes without a clue what they are talking about. “Si si bene bene grazie, bon journi!” he’d reply to them and they’d be on their way.

The language barrier doesn’t seem to faze this one character though. He is here to stay with his beloved Hurdi Gurdi. “We make artistic exchange!” he cries.

Once the 3 x 5 meter mural was finished I was expecting some sort of a scream of joy or something like that, but Ever just said: “I am always dissatisfied with a wall when I finish it. I never like it at first.”

Paris. The place where Ever has spent the last 2 months, and where he lived for a while back in 2010. Paris was the turning point for him; he began to inject politics into his art. “Paris is a political place for me”.

After just one night the wall was tagged and “Free Tibet” stickers had been stuck on the soldiers’ suits. “No, no this is good, this is France, it’s a good thing when the people react. We leave them on. This is like a conversation with the people.”

A lady who must have been about 80 years old appeared on day one, and whipped out a huge DSLR camera from her purse. She returned there everyday since. She even brought photographs she had taken of the process and took the time to hand write the date and place on each photograph.

From what I understand, after listening to countless conversations about street art, these artists are really looking for long term investors for their work, not just fast money. They’re resisting becoming a passing phase only to be dropped like a hot potato after this street art wave dies down. Fame seems to be irrelevant – but if it is a by-product then so be it. “I don’t like business, I just want to paint”, Ever says.

BSA>>>>>>>BSA<<<<<<<BSA<<><><>BSA>>>>>>>BSA<<<<<<<BSA<<><><>

Many thanks to Rosanna Bach for her diligence, passion and her talents.